Larry Brody's Guide to Writing for the Medium Everyone Loves to Hate

Defeating Rigid Habits to Spark Creativity

by Ben Weinlick

Recently, Shaun Brandt of ONST Creative and I presented a session on creativity at an event for hackers, creatives and designers. Over the course of 2 days a few hundred people attended Wordcamp to learn about blogging, design, coding, creativity and WordPress. Shaun and I wanted to present something a bit different than what might be expected at an event like Wordcamp and so we gave a session called Fostering Creativity by Looking in Unlikely Places.

At first glance Shaun and I are an unlikely pairing to present on the subject, but that was in many ways the point; to show what can happen when very different domains collide. Shaun is a successful entrepreneur who along with his business partner Cam Service launched ONST Creative (pronounced honesty creative) last year and ever since have been uber-busy with international clients seeking branding, design and web development. I asked them a while ago if they wanted to be part of think jar because I noticed their designs, originality and creativity is stellar and I sensed people could learn a lot about creativity and design from them.

For myself, although I come from an art and experimental music background, the area I’ve been applying creativity for the last decade has been in the domain of human services(social services). A number of years ago I saw the value and need for creativity in human services and proceeded to explore what creative processes could be relevantly applied to social service design. That led to graduate studies and research on what it takes to develop creative organizational cultures that yield better quality work. For the wordcamp talk I gave more of the background of what creativity is, what blocks it, and my own examples of creatively linking disparate, unlikely ideas and domains.

Below is a recap of the main points on Fostering creativity by looking in unlikely places.